Socioeconomic constraints can also stand in the way. Gulati et al. , for example, report low adoption of mechanical rice transplanters in India due to women’s weak bargaining position in the household decision making process. Mechanization is often associated with a reduced demand for labor. In theory, the impact of mechanization on labor demand and wages is unpredictable. This is because of two opposing effects: substitution and scale. Agricultural mechanization often occurs in response to rising rural wages, following the structural transformation of national economies towards industry and services, which draws labor out of the agricultural sector. As rural-urban migration expands, greater urban income earning opportunities become the main driver of agricultural wages. Higher wages induce farmers to mechanize and substitute capital for labor, as has now also been observed in Vietnam . Mechanization can also enable farmers to expand the scale of their production and increase their income. This can even happen without an original increase in wages, especially in land abundant countries. In fact, it can even induce an increase in real agricultural wages and hired labor , though the use of some intermediate labor-saving inputs like herbicides can mitigate this . An observed concurrence of rising agricultural wages with mechanization would suggest that wages induce farmers to adopt labor-saving methods, but when scale effects outweigh substitution effects, mechanization does not necessarily reduce rural employment. It is not surprising, therefore,hydroponic dutch buckets that the evidence on the labor effects of mechanization is mixed. Kirui reports that in African countries where land expansion previously was limited, mechanization has led to scale effects through an increase in the amount of cropland cultivated .

Scale effects have been accompanied by input intensification, higher productivity in maize and rice production, and greater labor use. However, in a number of countries, he also finds that mechanization displaces labor and induces off-farm work in some cases. Policy interventions and research efforts need to be tailored to specific regions and contexts. Overall, where there are limits to agricultural extensification, for example, due to labor scarcity and rising wages, increasing labor productivity through technological change, including mechanization, is the key to expanding food supplies.As technology changes, better educated and trained workers will have to be available to complement new advanced technologies.In most cases, technologies and skill demands in poor countries are not as advanced as in high-income countries like the United States, Western Europe, or Japan. Nonetheless, studies from developing countries reinforce the need to train workers for more skill-intensive employment, not only on farms but throughout the food supply chain, as the agricultural transformation unfolds and digital agriculture takes hold . The COVID-19 crisis may present an opportunity to accelerate the digitization of the agri-food system, helping players across the globe in all nodes of the AFS become more efficient and informed while bridging the ruralurban divide by improving participation in modern markets . Solar energy and mini-grids also offer important opportunities to increase labor productivity in agri-food, especially now that the cost of productive use leveraging solar energy products, such as solar driven water pumps , cold storage, and agri-processing equipment, is falling, appliance efficiency is increasing, and new business models are emerging.The two main policy areas for promoting mini grid expansion and greater adoption of PULSE products are becoming financially sound, through charging cost recovery tariffs and/or targeted government subsidies and having regulations that specify what happens when the large grid reaches the mini-grid areas. On both fronts, many initiatives are ongoing .

The adoption of these technologies could accelerate agricultural labor productivity growth, especially in Africa and South Asia; enable the development of delocalized agri-processing through refrigeration; and facilitate a more productive release of farm labor. In countries further along in the development process, the transition out of agricultural work is often accompanied by an inflow of immigrant workers, who help grease the wheels of farm labor markets by replacing native-born workers no longer willing to do farm work . Reliance upon immigrants has been a quintessential feature of the history of farm labor in the United States, particularly in the state of California, where two thirds of the nation’s fruits and nuts and one third of vegetables are grown. It is also widespread in other high-income economies, as well as many not-so-high-income ones like Costa Rica , Dominican Republic , and South Africa . In recent decades, California farmers have relied overwhelmingly on unauthorized migrant workers from Mexico. However, rural Mexicans are also transitioning out of farm work as families become smaller, children become better educated, and non-farm employment expands . Workers have become less willing to travel far away from their homes to work on farms for extended periods of time . Yet, when farm workers are less mobile, even more are needed to meet seasonal labor demands.The declining supply of immigrant farm workers and their reduced mobility has induced local labor shortages. In some cases, this has prevented farmers from being able to harvest high-value fruit and vegetable crops, which have simply rotted away in the fields . Expansion of the U.S. H-2A agricultural guest worker program is unlikely to offer a long-term solution, as labor recruiters compete with Mexican farmers for a diminishing number of farm workers. Mexico is expanding its fruit and vegetable production, in part, by importing farm workers from Guatemala, while sending fewer farm workers to the United States. Increased immigration enforcement has further led to an exit of immigrants from local farm labor markets and pushed unauthorized Mexican migrants further into the desert to avoid apprehension, leading to an increase in the number of border-crossing deaths .

These factors have exacerbated an already deteriorating situation for U.S. farmers and have led to a humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border. These trends are not specific to California or Mexico. They have been observed across high-income countries and are evident in other middle-income countries. Agricultural guest worker programs are common on all continents, in countries with vastly different incomes, and they tend to be controversial everywhere. The extent to which middle- and high-income countries already rely on immigrant labor has been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused governments across the world to enact emergency measures to relax mobility restrictions for agricultural workers to safeguard food production. Examples include the U.S. , Canada, Germany, and Spain , and Portugal and Italy . Migration can benefit migrant-receiving areas, beyond the farmers themselves, to the extent that migrants complement native workers, make agricultural operations more competitive, and stimulate the demand for goods and services. More importantly, from a development perspective, migration can benefit those who remain in the migrantsending economy . Migrant farm workers often earn much more than they could in their place of origin,bato bucket and the income they remit to family members can help loosen constraints on household production activities, generate income spillovers for other households, and create other positive externalities.A natural experiment from a migration lottery in New Zealand finds evidence that migrant earnings stimulate remittance flows and generate better mental health outcomes . If out migration causes the local labor supply to decrease, this can put upward pressure on wages, which can be beneficial to local workers but potentially harmful to farmers who rely on hired labor. Filipski et al. find econometric evidence that migration from Mon state in Myanmar to Thailand caused Mon state wages to rise. However, migrant remittances offset the negative effects of higher wages on Mon production, as the infusion of remittances into the local economy stimulated productive investments and created spillovers by raising the demand for local goods and services. The role of agriculture as a driver of remittances becomes more marginal as migrant networks develop and information about non-farm employment opportunities spreads. In the U.S., for example, immigrants have become increasingly prevalent in all of the other low-skilled sectors of the economy , revealing agriculture’s diminishing role over time. The World Bank predicts a significant reduction in remittances due to lockdown measures from the COVID-19 crisis that prevent migration . The decrease in remittances poses a huge threat to development, which could potentially push a significant number of people back into poverty. Restrictions on mobility and work have particularly affected workers who are ineligible to receive benefits from social safety nets due to their informal working arrangements or legal status. In Southeast Asia, aggregate agricultural production is predicted to decline by three percent as a result of reduced labor mobility and access to input and output markets, which could increase the number of people in poverty by as much as three percent . Ultimately the revival of remittances will depend on the mobility of labor after the crisis calms down.

Migration by men can affect the empowerment of women and the types of work in which they engage. Kar et al. find that, in Nepal, male out migration induces women to become the primary decision makers on the farm rather than simply providing labor to agricultural production. Women’s employment outcomes tend to improve if remittances accompany male migration. The receipt of remittances facilitates group membership and financial integration, as evidenced by the possession of bank accounts. However, in the absence of remittances, spouses of international migrants tend to be worse off with regard to several domains of empowerment, including decision making about certain productive activities, agricultural income, and access to information. In Senegal, when household members migrate but do not send remittances home, households become more food insecure. These findings underscore the importance of programs to reduce remittance costs and improve extension services that enable women to become more productive farmers and entrepreneurs in migrant-source economies. To reduce reliance on immigrant farm labor, farmers and countries could switch out of labor-intensive crops and import them from lower wage countries. Some U.S. farm operations already expanded into Mexico in order to meet the year-round demand of their customers. In fact, about half of the fresh fruit consumed in the United States and a third of fresh vegetables are imported. There is some evidence that farmers are planting more land in less labor-intensive crops like tree nuts, most of which are harvested by machines that shake the nuts off the tree and sweep them off the ground . However, consumer demand for fresh fruits and vegetables, both in the United States and abroad, continues to rise, and food imports are expanding. Consumers’ demand and willingness to pay for locally-grown produce increases as incomes rise, creating limits to countries’ reliance on food imports as a solution to the farm labor problem. At the other end of this trade often are countries with much lower land per laborer, such as China. Since the turn of the century, China has dramatically raised its exports of labor-intensive fruits and vegetables, while increasing its imports of less strategic, and more land intensive ones such as soybeans and corn for animal feed, much of it from the United States and Brazil .The structural transformation is a quintessential part of economic development everywhere; people move off the farm and pressure on agriculture grows to feed a growing population. What policies are required to address these issues logically depends on what stage of the development process a country is in and what institutions and social norms are in place. But at the core must lie a policy package that raises labor productivity in agriculture while leveraging the poverty-reducing powers of the AFS, mitigating the social-adjustment costs inherent to this transition, and avoiding the introduction of inefficient policies, such as the closure of borders for agricultural goods and labor. Accomplishing these tasks has been challenging in the past and will continue to be a challenge moving forward, with technological shifts, altering attitudes towards globalization, and climatic change further setting the boundaries of what’s possible and desirable. We conclude by pointing out a trio of policy entry points for developing countries, at the early to middle stages of the agricultural transformation, and for high-income countries at the late stages. The starting point for thinking about policy responses in developing countries is to recognize that agricultural labor productivity in many African countries continues to be dismally low, that current and future generations of young people are less willing than their parents to perform low-paying and onerous farm work, and that agricultural exports and emigration may offer fewer employment opportunities than in the past.